Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘ILNP’

I’m back! I never really left…but I did move! The new house is utterly incredible and farrr larger than we need (there are 5 bedrooms, 5!! And 8 fireplaces. Who needs 8 fireplaces?). Anyway, I only finally unpacked the nail polish two days ago, so I have been stuck working with 8 polishes for almost a month! You will see a lot of rainbow cremes coming up. This one is from the vault, I just didn’t get around to editing it before the move! This will be a theme. Regardless, sorry for disappearing on everyone for a month!

This mani was fun! A gradient, a stamp, and some fireflies! Its a weird sideways take on that famous bit of nail art by Chalkboardnails…although honestly they look very little alike. Of course, I ended up ripping the back of my middle finger open, so you guys also get the beautiful view of a bandaid :-p

Hope you enjoyed! And I will do my darndest to keep this blog updated. I have a whole lot of unshared manicures, but my time is getting tight! Although if anyone knows where to get decent (and cheap) antique furniture in St Louis I would be thrilled!

Super simple and super fast. This is one of the quasi-Christmas themed manicures I actually did over the holiday break. I more or less only took reds and greens with me, with a few stamping plates. I decided to do a tone-on-tone manicure using the wonderful opacity of every A England polish, and one of my favorite (if underused) dark green holos, Ski Lodge.

This whole manicure took less than an hour, and it was mostly waiting for Ski Lodge to dry before I could stamp. The design ended up being somewhat subtle, but since the nails were a vibrant shade of forest green, they were themselves far from subtle!

I love the concept behind this nail art, but I’m honestly not sure I love the execution? I think this design is busy enough that it would work better as an accent nail and not a full mani. So, just pick one or two nails and stare at them I guess!

This mani was time-consuming because instead of using striping tape I used stamps and freehand to make everything. Basically, I stamped the initial gold triangle at my cuticle with Penny Talk and then filled in the design (which was hollow) with Juliette. Once that was top coated and dried, I did the rest. I stamped with a black creme polish the black chevrons, and then the rose gold chevron again (each was an individual stamp…so there are 4 stamps on each nail except my thumb which was 6). I then colored in the black stamps with Storm, and did my best to spare the crossing rose gold. I could have just stamped with Penny Talk after the black was all dry, but that would be ANOTHER layer of top coat and drying and I was feeling lazy. So I colored around it :-p….it probably took longer anyway.

Again, needlessly complicated, but in the end kinda cool? I’ve been back on a bit of a geometric kick recently. I wish I had time for some freehand, I’ve been feeling inspired! That’s all for today, for Friday we get back to colors and some flowers! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

I don’t know where I was going with this mani, or why it makes me think of Pink Floyd, but here we are! Not another neon brick in the wall. Of course, in this particular scenario the bricks are truly pink and the grout is teal.

This mani was a bit of a mess. I started with a teal base, and then stamped a pink gradient over it. However, the pink did not come out as brightly as I wanted (in retrospect I should have used white first) so I stamped the same gradient again to brighten the color. Which worked…but since I used a different part of the stamp and frequently a different orientation on each nail, getting the same gradient was really difficult! I then decided it wasn’t pink enough so I added some Magician free-handed over the pink. So now there is also glitter.

In the end I wish I had just used striping tape. Generally that would take longer, but with how much time I spent on these I doubt it! I also messed up my thumb, I decided to add bright pink dots for no apparent reason. So you don’t get to see much of my poor weird-looking thumb.

Today is also a sad day, because my husband and I finally put in an offer for a (wonderful) house, and someone out-competed us (buy paying in cash, which is remarkable). I am sad! It had a perfect little nail art room and everything.

To be fair, when I painted these (well, stamped them) it was a few weeks out from Christmas. I always thought this particular stamp looked rather like christmas trees if you only used half of it! Otherwise it looks like stylized stalactites and stalagmites.

Of course, any manicure using an awesome mutlichrome and a rose gold stamping polish is going to look pretty good. This was easy to make pretty!

Short, sweet, and straightforward! If it helps, the reason this post is so short is that I am taking Step 3 of the medical board exam tomorrow. And Friday. Because of course it is a two day test *grumble grumble* but after this Friday I am free again!

Honestly, my nails were too long (that never happens!) for the nail art I was trying to create here! So I improvised a bit. I think the original might be better! It also kinda looks like one chevron (the black one) was bolded in my version, so voila, title!

The design was inspired by Penelope Luz, but her version is beautifully minimalist. Mine has more color. And glitter.

Sorry that the posts this week have been late/only a few photos, I’ve been sick! My husband it a pediatrician which means the kiddos give him lots of bugs. This time they gave him a respiratory virus and he had the courtesy to pass it on to me first time I’ve been sent home early from the hospital!

Anyway, on to nail art! This design was loosely inspired by @gabbysnailart. I love the colors but I personally wanted more glitter. Of course, the glitter is a LOT harder to remove than creme polish, but it is so sparkly! I don’t know what I thought I was doing stamping with Rosewater and then trying to color over the stamp, but here we are!

Time for a top 10 post! Every year I do two of them: my favorite 10 new polishes of that year (some of which will be new to me but have existed for a while, and this year about half of which are from the Polish Pickup Pack because that is where I keep getting new polish), and a second post that is my top 10 favorite nail art from this blog in 2018! I always look forward to other bloggers top 10s as well, so I know which polishes to buy! Here we go:

10. Zoya – Isadora
I think this is the only Zoya polish on the list, but it was close between this and Kelsey (a bright pink that I have used a bunch in nail art but only once by itself) but really I felt that I wanted to reward Zoya for making more beautiful metallics. I own a lot of purple metallics, and Isadora is just so pretty!

9. Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz
I have worn this polish probably 4 times since I got it from the Polish Pickup Pack, which given just how many polishes I own is really impressive! It is purple, blue, teal, and made of flakies, just how I like it! The colors and finish comes together nicely, and Polished for Days appears to make the best flakie suspension polishes. I think off all the new brands I discovered this year, PfD might be my favorite! I keep stalking their website waiting for a sale :-p

8. Ever After – Playing with Fire
This is another find from Polish Pickup, and it is a beauty. I wish I wasn’t stuck in residency so that I could wear this more frequently! I had been searching for a black-with-rainbows and had been disappointed in holo (because it never looks as rainbow as I’d like in a black base), glitter (too darn hard to remove), and settled on flakies…and this is just perfect. Technically the base is a very dark blue but I just cannot get over the combination of flakies. It is a perfect rainbow in a bottle.

7. Painted Polish – Just One Look
Is this prettier than #8 and #9 on my list? No. But is it cool looking AND can I wear it to the hospital? Yes. So this pale periwinkle with medium and small holo glitters takes 7th place. This is yet another Polish Pickup shade (are you guys sensing a theme here?) but I know other brands make similar colors and finishes. I happen to like it because it is a stunning color, work appropriate, and glittery to boot!

6. ILNP – Downpour
This polish. I got 4 new dark blue/teal holographic polishes this year and this one takes the cake. I have been wearing this on my toes since I got it and I regret nothing. Downpour has it all: dark blue, holo shards and glitters, and a metallic finish that makes it glow. That inner glow is really what sets it apart from the other of my new blue holos. I was on the fence when I first received it, but it has quickly grown to be the blue I reach for! The only caveat is that it takes 3 coats rather than 2.

5. ILNP – Fired Up
The next on the list is also an ILNP polish, this time Fired Up. Last year, Rosewater made my top 10, and Fired Up is the orange sister to Rosewaters pink. I love them both! This polish is just so darn glittery and shimmery, but somehow still wearable. It just makes me happy.

4. CbL – Frohe Feiertage!
If we are being honest Frohe Feiertage! and Fired Up are very similar. The difference is Frohe Feiertage! has a gold base and is a tad more subtle (aka more wearable in the hospital). I have worn this polish 3-4 times as well. It was my first (and thus far only) CbL but I can see why everyone loves the finish on these polishes! It was also a Polish Pickup buy.

3. Born Pretty – Astral Realm
I think this is the first time a Born Pretty polish has made my top 10 list? And in the top 3 at that! This is a polish I was sent to review and I fell completely in love. I have ok luck with magnetic polishes, and had been lusting after a magnetic multichrome when I got this. And it just. Works. Its amazing. Even my old many-straight-parallel-lines magnet, which usually looks like a blurry mess, worked like a charm. Yes, this polish requires a black base. Yes it is in a small bottle. No I don’t care, if all magnetics were all this pretty I would never buy anything else!

2. Emily de Molly – Traverse the Skies
I meant to put this polish on the top 10 LAST year but forgot that I hadn’t posted the nail art it went with! Regardless, this polish is absolutely stunning and has become my platonic ideal of what a shimmer with flakie shards should look like. I love it. If you don’t own this polish and like blue, purple, silver, or just pretty looking nails in general, go buy it. You won’t regret it.

1. Polished for Days – Grey Opal
This polish made #1 by dint of being stunning, elegant, work-appropriate, and easy to remove despite its flakie burden. Kudos to Polished for Days! Unfortunately this beauty was another Polish Pickup special, but PfD makes a lot of similarly finished and colored polishes on their website. This polish was opaque in two coats, had perfect control on the brush, and was just overall wonderful to work with and wear.

Thats my top 10 for the year! Moral: Polished for Days is amazing, join the Polish Pickup Pack if you haven’t already, and I am really into nude shimmers and blurples this year! What were your favorite polishes this year that I should invest in?

Snowflakes! More snowflakes! Snowflakes on a windy background! I decided I wanted more color so on top of Downpour (the dark blue) I dry marbled some Party Favor (teal), then stamped with Yummy (lighter blue) before stamping with silver.

Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, for some reason most of the photos came out blurry. So today there are only a few photos (although 3 does tend to be normal for me now) and I did my best to pick in-focus ones!

Maybe I should have posted something a bit more Christmas-y today, but all my manis got pushed back a day, so my official christmas mani will go up on Wednesday and holiday nails will continue through Friday. Oops! Enjoy anyway :-p

Yes, it is a pun off the name of the polish, yes I am a goofball! Also, today formally begins the series of holiday-appropriate nail art. This one was painted during autumn but is honestly more red/green than orange/green which was the initial intent!

Anyway, this is a very very simple manicure (as many are during things like residency). Just a polish and a stamp. Now, the polish happens to be a multichrome, and the stamp is a holo. Honestly, I didn’t think this color combo would work that well, but Dragon stamps amazingly well (I just need to acknowledge that A England makes polishes that stamp like magic).

This mani tried so hard, but ultimately fell to the age-old adage: do not stamp over glitter with glitter (use a creme or a metallic). I started with a purple/gold multichrome but I was working too fast and my nails bubbled! So obviously I had to make a galaxy…but every time I tried to sponge on a new color I ended up hating it! I ended up just covering all the other sponged work with a dark purple glitter and some gold. Oh well!

As mentioned above, I also wish I hadn’t stamped with a glitter. Metallics just work much better. I was trying to make everything sparkly but the end result is that it is difficult to see the designs! I’ll need to re-use this stamp again soon, it is super cool.

Every time I work with Valerie I wish I used it more, but I am always afraid to! Zoya keeps discontinuing their prettiest polish. Zoya: MORE GLITTERS! YOUR GLITTERS ARE GREAT! Anyway…hope you enjoyed! And let the moral be do not stamp with glitter over a glittery base!

Happy almost-halloween! This year my husband and I ended up at two different pumpkin carving events, so now we have four pumpkins. Which is double our previous yearly count of pumpkins. I carved a set: a dragon and a castle. My husband carved a pokemon (because of course he did)…and a pumpkin. Into his pumpkin. He is an absolute dork!

Anyway, I have a bunch of fall manis lined up, but I only did one halloween manicure this year! I kinda forgot that October meant Halloween. Oops. I’ll do better next year! This year’s halloween mani is decided to stamping jack-o-lanterns. I received another plate to review from the Born Pretty Store (which was thankfully well-etched) and went to town! Unfortunately, the dark orange I used for the pumpkins is more a jelly than a cream, but I still got away with single-pass stamping on some nails (thumb and ring finger). That said, I am not surprised I had to double stamp, I need to stop using glitter polish bases! But when trying to pick a base color my head just went ‘GOOOOLD’ so here we are!

Hope you enjoyed! And I hope everyone gets lots of candy and tasty treats. If you want to pick up this pumpkin and web-decked plate, head over to the Born Pretty Store where you can find it on sale for $2.99.

Is this really pastiche? Not so much. A lot of my nail art apes that of other artists that I’ve seen and liked…this was sort of a general “I like things that are somewhat pastel and look like watercolor and flowers” and I tried to make it happen!

It turns out, of course, that I also like things that glitter. The end result of this mani was actually pretty fun, but I just kept adding more things! Lines and more lines and dots…In the end I wish I had used a lighter silver holo base for my accent nail, but I love the pink shine to Rosewater!

This mani ended up boring and almost ugly. I like the base polish a lot but every time I try to come up with some color to use over it, I turn to dark purple-grey or gold! And for some reason most of the designs end up wonky looking.

I don’t know why I picked this stamp (which seems to be a trend this week) but it ended up looking like rungs on a ladder or maybe the straps on a fancy jacket? If fancy jackets came in murky purple tones? I don’t know!

Anyway, leaving all this aside, the 31 Day Challenge starts this weekend! I am not going to be participating every day because I don’t have enough manis backlogged and I certainly don’t have enough time to paint and edit that much, but I am going to keep to posting three times a week and matching my nails of the day to that days prompt! I think there will be a few where I jump a day forward or backwards, but I should have most of them sorted out. I love seeing what everyone puts together for the #31DC2018!

This manicure makes me happy and sad, which is unusual for something as simple as nail art! But looking at these, as much as I hate my nail length, I like how they ended up!

Once they were done, they reminded me of a stone so I went looking for something appropriate on the internet. Apparently, serpentine is a deep green stone with flecks of color and beige-gold veins. Perfect! I wish I could say I was TRYING to make a pretty rock, but I was mostly just having fun with flakies and stamps.

I wasn’t initially going to post these because I broke three nails (omg so sad) and my nails are painfully short and slightly misshapen as a result. However, I liked how the design came out, so I am posting them anyway! Maybe those of you with short nails will find inspiration.

This is a super complicated mani, but I kinda love it. I was sent some very tiny rose gold caviar beads to review from the Born Pretty Store, and I went to town with them!

Most of my caviar beads are what I would consider standard size…which is easily twice the size of these ones. Look at how many pretty rows are on my middle finger! I ended up mix-and-matching with a fishtail, some other studs, and basic diagonals. I had seen a similar mani online, but I didn’t want to use a black base so I settled on a very dark blue with subtle gold shimmer 🙂

I have never really tried to place a bunch of studs and then surround them with caviar beads, mostly because my other caviar beads are larger, and the whole thing takes forever. That said, I did my middle finger first (well, I did the polish-only nails first, but it was the first nails with 3D elements) and since that only took 10 minutes, I went ahead and did the others with lots of tiny beads too. Success!

If you want to pick up these tiny beads for yourself, head over to the Born Pretty Store, where you can find them for $1.79. I kinda love them, and can’t wait to figure out ways to use them now!

Whoops! I apparently forgot to write this post until this moment! So it’s going to be a bit short (and forgive me if it is disjointed, I am very sleep deprived).

The art here is inspired by urban nail art…but for some reason I didn’t copy over the link? I don’t even know. Tired Eva makes bad decisions about planing and the like. Either way, urban nail art had a pink shimmery gradient and black flames, and I decided I wanted the same! But then I went and picked the WRONG base polish…

So, my background color here is the second lightest of the pinks (the absolute lightest is really more of a pale orange so I went with the medium one for the base under the gradient), and that was a crucial error. It is a polish called Peony by Ruby Wing, and I hate it. Really, I do. It is both scented AND filled with undissolved chunks of something. This polish makes me tear my hair out! I meed to find a buy a dupe so I can get rid of it.

What’s even worse is that I forgot one other crucial fact about Peony: it is a solar-active polish that changes color in sunlight. When I was going through the photos I started getting upset…all the ones taken outside in the sun looked like there was no gradient! And then I realized Peony’s color range is coral pink to bright pink-red. So my gradient disappeared to just bright red in the sun. :-(. I give up! The indoor photos are good, the single outdoor one is just sad.

This was a fun mani to put together! I always love combining multichromes an seeing what comes out of them. This was especially rewarding because I had never come up with an idea on how to use these stamps before and I love how it came out!

So, between a multichrome gradient and two different colored stamps, I ended up with a big of a complicated mani. I don’t care. For once, complicated works!

Also, this mani is a bit of a temporal milestone: I officially start residency tomorrow (in the cardiac intensive care unit) AND it’s my 30th birthday tomorrow. So, I am leaving behind my 20’s, and starting to care for really sick patients in one go. This also means that, while I will try, my posting schedule is likely to get a bit wonky while I am staffing the CCU!

I only used two multichromes in the gradient on these nails, so while the other colors do shine through, the primary purple is Undenied, and the primary gold is Greatness. Hope you enjoyed, and happy early birthday to me!

Eeep! Sorry for the extended absence…after moving a WEEK ago, AT&T failed to install our internet and we didn’t get wifi until today! So this really is the first time I could have posted :-p

Anyway, this mani is wayyy too complicated! A stamp this complicated needs a creme-on-creme finish, none of this playing with 5 colors of holographic glittery purple and stamping in silver. I love the stamps but this is too much!

I also likely should not have added dots. Oops! Live and learn. It’s still kinda fun!

I was so close! I tried to get this up on Monday, but none of the art was edited at all yet. So, slightly past midnight, sorry! Posting is going to get a bit hectic. I spent all day packing, and I only have a few more days to be ready to move and I am in no way packed! The nail art room is getting packaged tomorrow, which is going to be really sad (the apartment we are moving in to only has two bedrooms, not two bedrooms and a tiny study perfect for nail polish).

All this is to say that if the posts start getting hectic and delayed, I am sorry! Between packing, moving, unpacking, orientation, and then starting on an intensive care unit rotation right off the bat (which, that is going to be TERRIFYING), I have no idea when my posts will go back to normal! Nor do I really have any idea if I’ll be able to keep the nail art coming in residency, but I will try!

Anyway, today’s post was done using the teal holographic swatch comparison. The end art is a bit clumpy…the fat straight lines are from a stamp and all the rest of the embellishments were hand-painted. But, it was all I had on deck so here it is!